ase: Book icon (Books)
ase ([personal profile] ase) wrote2011-04-16 10:24 pm

The Striking Resemblance 2006 Bears to 1964

Aha!

Trying to engineer social change and improve quality of life are key concepts driving my small-l liberal politics, but the way Dag and Fawn go about it, especially in Horizon, makes me wonder when someone's going to put a torch to the Forbidden Tower Tent.

(2006: The Sharing Knife: Beguilement is published. 1964: The Bloody Sun is published.)

The appropriate paired reading would probably be the much racier The Forbidden Tower (1977) with The Sharing Knife: Horizon, since tFB digs into the "psychics defying the cultural norm / power structures" experiment, but The Bloody Sun describes the reactionary backlash and some of the moderate counter-swing (licensed matrix technicians) to the reactionary backlash (our ancient pure ways or death). One wonders if, say, Barr's farmer-raised half-lakewalker child is lakewalker enough to share, or if the affinity lakewalkers share with malices is a social construct which a lakewalker-raised farmer might share too. It's unlikely LMB will write a SK: The Next Generation novel just for my worldbuilding curiosity, fortunately for everyone else. Though if it were timed right, there's a chance SK:TNG would have trains and telegrams, oh my.

(And Nattie-Mari would be Jeff Kerwin, Jr! If she carried off the SK equivalent of the Keeper of Arilinn, I would be absolutely okay with this. Though her mother already sort of has. Or maybe Sumac did. I have deep affection for Sumac and Arkady's midlife courtship.)

I'm still having an sf/f fan reaction to a romance novel, aren't I. Well, it's more fun this way.